Appliances and equipment used in a home or business such as cooking stoves, hot water heaters, heating ventilation/air conditioning (HV/AC) units, and refrigerators are assets for which information is required for repair and maintenance as well as for warranty coverage. Serial number, model number, manufactured date, and installed date are often difficult to accurately obtain years after the equipment was manufactured and installed.
Identification tags have been employed to assist in the identification and tracking of physical assets, and to facilitate timely repair and appropriate warranty coverage. Commonly, asset identification tags utilize printed matter for visually providing relevant information about the tagged asset. Typical information includes the type of equipment tagged, the equipment manufacturer and model number, and the date of manufacture.
In other cases, service or installation personnel create paper records at the time of installation. While systems utilizing paper records or printed matter tags are relatively inexpensive, they suffer from problems associated with the loss of the paper work, separation of the asset tag from the asset, failure to adequately file the paper documents, and misreading or incorrect entry of the asset information from the paper record or tag. For paper records, there is physical correlation between the paper records or copies and the asset or physical equipment. Tagged equipment is often placed in a harsh environment such as a commercial or industrial kitchen, and printed information on tags frequently is covered with dirt or grease, so that the printed tag cannot be read. In other environments, the tag material or the print on the tag is damaged or quickly aged by chemical exposure or weather conditions, so that the tag cannot be read. Moreover, considerable time and expense are required to obtain access to the tag, read and record the information, and input the information into a data recordation system.
The lack of pertinent, complete, and accurate asset information and data results in delays in servicing of equipment and identification of required repair parts, and inaccuracies in the appropriate warranty coverage. Inaccurate warranty information provides for increased costs to manufactures as manufacturers often calculate warranty dates on estimates. This inaccuracy also provides for increased customer dissatisfaction when a warranty date for coverage of the repair costs is at issue.
In recent years, electronic technologies have been applied in some cases to replace printed records or printed asset tags. These have included tags with an electronic memory or transponder to store relevant asset information. One solution has been a radio frequency identification (RFID) transponder. Such RFID tags are commercially available for providing either a “read only” output, or a “write and read” output. An identification tag with an RFID transponder is read by a radio frequency reader device, which may electronically record and process the data for inventory, tracking, and warranty purposes. The RFID transponder is placed at a position where the information in the transponder may be read by a remote reader. The cost of reading the identifying information is reduced as the line of sight between the transponder and the reader is often not required. In such systems, the stored information is recorded electronically in a format that does not require the subsequent manual entry of data into a computer.
However, problems associated with electronic or “smart” identification tagging systems such as the RFID tags have limited their use and effectiveness. This includes the high cost of manufacturing the tag, the limited techniques for attaching the tag to the physical asset, and the high cost of initially tagging and retagging the asset. Significant costs are generally associated with initially tagging and subsequently re-tagging the physical asset. RFID tagging systems have significant inventory costs since the entire cost of the tag including the RFID transponder is incurred when the tag is manufactured. When the desired “read only” information in the transponder changes, the manufacturing and inventory cost of the entire tag is effectively lost.